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GRASP Seminar Series: Spring 2005
February 18, 11:00 AM, Levine Hall 307.
Maja Mataric
USC
“Toward Assistive Action, Interaction, and Engagement for Robot Teams and Human-Robot Systems”
Abstract: This talk will describe our work aimed at enabling robots to provide useful assistance to people in a variety of settings, ranging from disaster response to convalescence and rehabilitation, to special education. This broad spectrum of problem domains shares is unified by a common set of research challenges: goal-driven real-time action, interaction, and engagement of the human and robot participants. Action in dynamic human environments requires architectural considerations. We will briefly describe our general behavior-based methodology using primitives to tie perception to action in a classification-based framework capable of adaptation and learning. Interaction, both robot-robot and human-robot, requires situational awareness and adaptivity. We will describe our work on coordination of multi-robot teams, focusing on a formal framework for addressing distributed task allocation and effective on-line algorithms for multi-robot coordination. We will also describe a methodology for automated synthesis of provably correct multi-robot controllers for distributed tasks. Finally, engagement is necessary for time-extended productive human-robot interaction (HRI). We will overview our newest work on an embodied architecture for HRI and imitation-based engagement, both aimed at goal-driven, assistive domains that necessitate measurable outcomes with human users. We will describe our work on robot-assisted post-cardiac surgery recovery and post-stroke rehabilitation, as well as robot-assisted special education and work-place systems under development.
Biography: Maja Mataric is an associate professor in
the Computer Science Department and Neuroscience Program at the University
of Southern California, founding director of the USC Center for Robotics
and Embedded Systems (cres.usc.edu), and co-director of the USC Robotics
Research Lab (robotics.usc.edu). She received her PhD in Computer Science
and Artificial Intelligence from MIT in 1994, her MS in Computer Science
from MIT in 1990, and her BS in Computer Science from the University of
Kansas in 1987. She is a recipient of the Okawa Foundation Award, NSF
Career Award, the MIT TR100 Innovation Award, the IEEE Robotics and Automation
Society Early Career Award, the USC School of Engineering Junior Research
Award, the Provost's Center for Interdisciplinary Research Fellowship,
and is featured in the documentary movie "Me & Isaac Newton." She is an
associate editor of three major journals and has published extensively.
Her research is aimed at endowing robots with the ability to help people
through individual assistance (for convalescence, training, education,
companionship, etc.) to multi-robot team cooperation (for habitat monitoring,
emergency response, etc.) and focuses on intelligent control and learning
in complex, high dimensional/high degree of freedom systems that integrate
perception, representation, and interaction with people (see
